Crusader Kings III - Characters
To celebrate the three year anniversary since release, I am publishing some of the work I have done for Crusader Kings III.
I have had the roles of Lead Character Artist and Principal Character Artist in the project. I had responsibility over the character generation system in the game, meaning I created the components that make up the dynamic characters. These include base meshes, rigs, deformation animations, textures, decals, blend shapes and much more.
The game uses a sophisticated genetics system to generate characters and to allow them to inherit appearance from their ancestors. I designed this genetical setup, adding more than 130 genes to control the appearance of facial and body features. The ambition was to build a system that could generate any kind of human appearance using the same base meshes. After much work and many iterations we ended up with a setup that allows us to blend easily and seamlessly between different ethnicities, facial features, ages, body types etc. This is all stored in DNA data for each character, which is passed on to their children in the game.
As a lead artist I also had responsibility for creating the pipelines for accessories like clothes and hair and lead the team that created the many hundreds of assets used by characters in the game. It was a great collaborative effort between the small character art team at Paradox Development Studio and our good friends over at Ringtail Studios.
Having a great interest in history, and especially costume history, it was natural that I also did most of the research and design of how the clothes should look.
Overall for me Crusader Kings III has been, and continues to be, an amazing experience and an opportunity to bring the medieval world to life, which is something I find deeply rewarding.
Some examples of characters from the game. These are all created from the same base mesh by using the genetics system that I set up in the game. Some are randomly generated and others are designed to a specific appearance.
More examples. The facial features, ethnicities and appearances are all my work. I modelled some of the clothes and headgear, hairstyles etc. and oversaw all of them, working closely together with my team to design, create and implement all those assets.
Some of the clothes I designed and created for the game. A few of the headgear seen here were modelled and textured by my talented colleagues.
Showing the seamless aging from child to old age. I created several variants so that different characters will age a bit differently.
Examples of the many different body types that are in the game. They all share the same base mesh and are created from a combination of blend shapes, joint deformations and texture overlays.
It wouldn't be a proper medieval setting without some horrible diseases! I had the questionable privilege of researching and creating them.